John Donne’s treatment of love

John Donne started the trend of metaphysical poetry in English literature. For this reason, he is considered to be a very important poet of English literature. For many years, his poems were not appreciated. Thanks to brilliant poets like T.S. Eliot, his work is widely appreciated by the readers. Donne started his career as a poet in the late Elizabethan period, and he came out of the influence of major poets like Shakespeare and created a new style in poetry.

The subject of love occurred naturally in Donne’s poetry because from ancient times we see that in literature, especially in poems, love is given a lot of importance. In all ages, the poets always talked about love between a man and woman though in real life the scope of love was very limited. Still, poets praised love all the time.

What is striking about John Donne is that he introduced a new idea about love. Predecessors of Donne portrayed love as something heavenly and noble. Though lovers live in the world but enjoy heaven on earth. Donne neither admitted it nor denied it. He did not deny the importance of love in human life, but he did not present love as a heavenly object all the time in his poems. Love also causes pain, emotional upset and treachery. Sometimes he brutally attacked women. He said that no beautiful girl remains faithful to his lover. On the contrary, he spoke highly of his wife. The high thought about love that dominated in the works of the poets of ancient times was also very common among Elizabethan poets. Elizabethan poets of England were highly influenced by Petrarch, the famous Italian poet. Petrarch, in his poems, spoke highly of his beloved. This trend was broken by John Donne. It helped other poets to think in a different manner.

John Donne portrayed love from a realistic point of view. He even used logic to justify love. We all know that love has a deep connection with emotion, and love, in most cases, does not follow logic. It is impossible to judge love using logic. John Donne tried that impossible feat in many of his poems.

In fact, Donne tried to portray the true picture of love. It is true that love brings great joy and happiness in the hearts of the lover and his beloved, but it also causes pain, and Donne successfully presented this idea in his poems. Most of the lovers are men and they compose poems about their wives and beloved. We see some exceptions in Donne in this regard. Women did not have any freedom at that time and they had no rights or privileges. Most of the women were illiterate. There were no separate colleges for them. Most of the women studied at home and most men did not recognize women as a separate entity. Women did not inherit anything from their fathers or husband. John Donne in his poetry talked about women’s separate entity and their freedom. Sometimes they use their freedom for evil purposes and cheat on their lovers, but they have a separate entity.

In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” poem, John Donne’s treatment of love is sensuous. In this poem, his statement repeats the Platonic statement that physical contact is not necessary for the development of spiritual love. It refers to a temporary departure when Donne was called from home. The poet compares him and his beloved with two legs of a compass. While one leg of a compass remains fixed, the other moves around to complete the circle. The physical existence is not necessary if a true bond of the minds has occurred, thus joining a pair of lovers’ souls eternally.

However, in some of his poems, we can find the influence of Petrarch and Ovidian. Such a poem is “Twickenham Garden”. This poem tells the poet’s friendship with the Countess of Bedford, a cultured and accomplished lady of the seventeenth century. There is no authentic source to know if the lady nodded her head to the love of the poet. This poem shows how love changes joy into sorrow. The poet is so unhappy that even spring cannot bring happiness to the poet’s heart. Women, in general, are false, and as a result, they are not worthy of being trusted, but the poet’s sweetheart is an exception. The poet wishes that lovers should judge their mistresses’ love by comparing the taste of her tears with that of their tears.

“The Good-Morrow” is another poem that shows the lover’s move from discussing sensual love to spiritual love. He realizes that, with spiritual love, the couple can be liberated from fear and the need to seek adventure. The poet said that he and his beloved are one because they are similar in all respects and as such none of them will die. Their mutual love can neither decrease, nor decline nor come to an end. Their love is immortal.

In his poem “Go and Catch a Falling Star”, we can find his cynical view towards women. It is one of the most common formulas in his love poems. It is anti-woman and hostile to the fair sex. The poet shows the impossibility of finding a true and fair woman. The speaker tells his listener that if he ever finds a true and fair woman then he would go to her as if he is going on a pilgrimage to some holy place. He also said that an ugly woman may be constant, but a beautiful woman can never be so.

John Donne thought very differently about love and he was the first one to present love as a complex matter. Poets before done talked about love as it was a heavenly object and did not think about it from a realistic point of view but Donne emphasized logic along with emotion.

John Donne’s treatment towards women

John Donne is one of the famous poets of the seventeenth century. He has been highly acclaimed for his metaphysical poems and is regarded a major metaphysical poet for his writing style. In his poems, he has beautifully shown the love relationship between man and woman from both sensuous and realistic perspectives, and to do so, he sometimes criticizes women and sometimes praises them. His mixed attitude towards female figure has made him apart from both the Petrarchan and the Platonic school of thoughts. Here, in this writing, you will find how he treated women in his literary works. 

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In the poem “Go and Catch a Falling Star”, John Donne has showed his cynical attitude towards women. Women’s faithlessness is the main theme of this poem. According to him, finding a fair and chaste woman is an impossible task. Beautiful women will have several lovers, and for that reason, it is not possible for them to be loyal to any of them. A woman is constant only when she is ugly, and there is no one to love her. He also said that if anyone can find such a fair and honest lady, the poet would like to visit her as if on a pilgrimage to some holy place.

In the poem “Twickenham Garden”, we can see the similar kind of attitude towards women. He said that all women are false. They cannot remain loyal to a single lover. The interesting thing is that in the same poem we can find his different view when he talks about his beloved. He said that only his beloved is true because she is faithful to a single lover. He greatly admires her for this particular quality, which is, undoubtedly, a rare virtue in womanhood.

In the poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, we can also find his different view about women when he spoke highly of his wife, Anne More. This poem discloses the poet’s eternal faith in life. Conjugal love at its best is more rewarding and meaningful than weeping in unfulfilled love. As it shows the fulfillment of a happy married life that is why, it is called one of the best love poems written by John Donne.

The above stated poems reveal Donne’s satirical-cynical attitude towards womankind. He comes out of the influence of the Petrarchan tradition of woman-worship. He himself is the victim of woman’s inconstancy. That is why, he considers a constant woman as a rarity.

We can find John Donne’s anti-Petrarchan thought about women. He did not hesitate portraying the negative side of women. In these poems, readers can find women as ordinary human being with full of flaws or errors. It means that he has depicted women in an opposite way of what the followers of the Petrarchan tradition have shown women in their poems. It should be known to all that followers of the Petrarchan tradition treated women as virtuous or goddess or deities. Their main concern was to portray the beauty and positive sides of women.